Heads Up Homesteaders: Crop Swap Begins in Berkeley

It’s that time of year when the abundance from a backyard vegetable garden can be a tad prolific. How many zucchini squash can one family eat? Or perhaps your produce problem comes from human error: you simply planted way too many onions and not enough greens.

Help is on the way. Beginning tonight the people behind the newly formed grassroots group Transition Berkeley invite residents to share their harvest at a Crop Swap in the public park next to the Ohlone Greenway on Sacramento Street.

It couldn’t be simpler: you show up with your freshly harvested lettuces or lemons and share or swap them for some plums or potatoes. That’s it. No money changes hands.

Berkeley is just one of a grassroots network of more than 300 transition towns around the globe organizing their communities to become more resilient, self-reliant and sustainable. In keeping with that philosophy, the Berkeley coalition, which numbers 80 members and counting, encourages locals to lower their carbon footprint, grow food close to home, pool resources, reduce their use of fossil fuels and foster community. Such behaviors are critical, transition advocates say, to facing challenges such as climate change, oil dependency and depletion, and a persistent economic downturn.

But back to the far easier matter of exchanging excess fruits and vegetables. Gardeners who grow their own food have always shared their surplus with neighbors. Who among us hasn’t been the beneficiary of spinach, rhubarb, or cucumbers from the avid grower next door? Or, as Leah Garchik recently noted in her Chronicle column, arugula and cilantro, the Berkeley equivalent of summer surplus.

The Crop Swap simply invites fellow urban food farmers to trade kale or carrots beyond their block. Similar swaps are already under way in Albany and Oakland.

“We hope this will be a forum for people to get to know others in the community who grow produce and exchange ideas about growing food,” said co-organizer Carole Bennett-Simmons, a retired public school teacher, who tends a plot at the Peralta Community Garden, where she’s currently harvesting Swiss chard, bok choy, and beets.

Folks are encouraged to walk, bike, or catch public transit and come share their homegrown, ripe goods, including fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Plans are to run the Monday meet-up through October and then return in the early spring with seeds and starts for garden planting.

Crop Swap takes place on Mondays, starting July 18, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., in the public park next to the Ohlone Greenway on the east side of Sacramento Street at Delaware, across from the North Berkeley BART station

I sure could have used something like this during feijoa (pineapple guava) season. Two hundred kilos of a fruit that doesn’t keep for more than a few days at a time is more than the two of us can eat fresh and I only managed to preserve half of it. Most of the rest of it was given away, but it would have been nice to get the odd onion or what not in return!

Odd onion, you could have fed yourself and the hubbie on all the bounty you could have traded for those pineapple guava in peak season. Maybe something to think about starting in your neck of the woods next season, M?

This is a wonderful idea. I love the community coming together to share abundance. We have a crop swap here, but I’ve yet to attend. My liliko‘i are just coming in, though, so I’ve finally got something to swap.

Lovely idea, lovely pictures. You mentioned community gardens–as I was reading this I thought that might be a prime spot for other communities to start this. So if they already have a community garden, then those within it could sponsor a swap and invite those who have plots along with members of the community? Just a thought. My community doesn’t have a gardening plot, but a neighboring one does and I like to look at the people working on their plots as I drive by.

This is a great idea; do they do it for fruit, too? I hate watching all the citrus going to waste in my neighborhood, lying under people’s trees when I’d be happy to make lemonade with it. And meanwhile I’m drowning in apples….

Fruit, for sure, M. Lots of plums, lemons, strawberries, loquats, and rhubarb at the first swap. I’m always sharing my Meyer lemons and happy to accept some Santa Rosa plums in exchange (also totally fine with just spreading the wealth and giving away with no expectation of anything in return, as many folks do).

What a great idea that’s also a community builder. My lemon tree is prolific, I’m always sad to see much of the fruit go to waste. There are only so many ways one can use lemons. Next winter, I’m looking for a food swap.